Database Content

One of the most powerful applications of Active Call Center is the ability to deliver content generated dynamically from corporate data stores to the caller. Many of us have had exposure to these types of services, they include:

• Touch tone based credit card information.
• Touch tone banking.
• Automated flight arrival and departure information.
• Systems that allow tracking of packages and shipments.

These and other applications that required integrated database content can be generated easily with Active Call Center, often at a fraction of the cost of competing solutions.

The basic steps involved in creating interactive Call Trees that deliver database content is as follows:

• Identify the data to be delivered to the caller and the fields that will be used as lookup keys to retrieve the data.
• Design a Call Tree that collects the lookup keys, preferably by touch tone.
• Use the information input by the caller to construct a query into the database.
• Use a COM interface to the database application to perform the query through a VBScript macro. If the database being used does not have a COM interface, link tables in the database to a database that does have a COM interface or build a COM interface for the required features of the database in Visual Basic or some other programming language. For more information on integrating database applications, refer to How to Read and Write a Database from a Macro.
• Report the results to the caller using Speak variables.

The Database Example Call Tree in the Examples folder provides a simple example of how to read and write data to a Microsoft Access database.